Zaldrizer Sovessis: A Song of Spice and Desire
by Velask
Summary: "All dragons must fly." With the defeat of Maelys the Monstruous, it's up to his widow Serala of Myr to protect their unborn child and her bastard half-brother, the child soon to become known as Varys. Players include the Lords Hightower and Darklyn, upon whom the scheming Lothston brothers and the new commander of the Golden Company, Myles Toyne, are pinning their hopes.
1. Prologue

One breath, and then another, and another, and another.

As the clattering of the horses hooves grew duller, she kissed the child one last time before bracing herself for the harsh visages of those onlooking. She wished away the widow's tears forming in her eyes, pursing her lips in order to harden her resolve. She turned, instantly focusing herself on the sheen of the vigorously polished mahogany of the great oval table which so consumed this chamber. Between her and the hazy reflection of herself lay all the curves and shades of the Weeping Lady, that most ubiquitous and ignominious figures.

Broken or not, she was still their Queen, and she'd be damned if she let them forget it.

She held the child closer and kissed his temples tenderly.

"I shall sell the sword."

The two men did not even exchange so much as a look, so united were they in their resolve. The stouter of the two pushed away the lowest-hanging of his red curls to look her straight in the eye.

"_We_ bear the sword."

She stroked her stomach, swollen as it was, placing the plump, rosy boy in his cot. The younger of the brothers preempted her before she could muster a reply.

"We will go to Myr, there is coin to be made in the west... When we have enough coin we'll return for you...you must make do until then."

"And the children?"

He frowned and looked at his brother before conceding. "Aye, them too.."

"You must make do, Serala, that's all there is to it."

She found no security in those words but there was not much else to hold onto in these dark and dangerous times. Few friends were left her, fewer still capable of doing anything for her and her children. In a cave so dark and desolate as the one she found herself in, a mad bat or two was nothing to fear.

Her mouth was all bitter but her resolve was beaten steel. "I will bear a daughter, and she will wed him. From their union the dragons will be reborn and Valyria forged again from flames beyond count. They shall bear the sword, and fire and blood will follow in their wake. Come back or do not come back, I-"

The stouter of the brothers straightened his back, sighing heavily so as to cut her off. "The company can do nothing for you now, and I for one will not be surprised if it is done entirely before this coming war season is through. The monster has left no one to lead us, and each man makes plans of his own for the future, for there is no whoring of yours in the world which will suffice to feed us all."

The two stood and left as she heaped curses upon them in her heart of hearts. The child, already free from the constraints of his cot and set out onto the finely carpeted floor, scampered off after them but turned in shock and sadness as his rotund form crashed against the shut door. Her mother, who had said nothing until now, stood and walked over to him, the boy for his part wrapping his grubby hands around her index finger as she lead him over to the Myrish glass at the far end of the room, where all her concoctions of beauty and apparel lay spread out in display. The two exchanged a meaningful look but said nothing, Serala casting her sights back out the window at the passage-way from whence her husband's messengers of death had so recently made their escape from this hell she called home.


	2. Chapter 1

CHAPTER I. THE GILTED COMPANIONS

"She's gone, Myles, and we're all the better for it."

The Blackheart looked at the brothers, before nodding curtly in acquiescence at the dreaded news which dashed his dreams on the rocks. Underneath his plated chainmail he was already sweltering, the beating sun warming up his tent so as to make the place unbearably hot and stuffy.

"And the mother?"

"Dying of the pox, last we heard. Not that it matters, for she is no Blackfyre, and it is to them that we owe our-"

"Black or red, a dragon is still a dragon." The new Lord Commander of the Golden Company swished the phrase around in his mouth as if it's taste was at once foreign and natural to him. He could still marry the mother, perhaps, put a babe in her belly and avenge his house fighting for the succession of that child over the falseborn heirs of the Dragonknight...

"With all due respect, my lord, she is no dragon, but an old and overworked whore with a dried up womb and a foul smelling mouth."

The thinner of the brothers concurred. "We made inquiries, lord, and...well, she is little more than a corpse at this point. The mistress of the pillow house has gone to great efforts, _great_ efforts, to revive her...but alas, it is to no avail. She is _as_ dead, if not yet quite so in fact."

The Blackheart eyed the two men intently for a split second before dismissing the two from his presence. He had not the resources to send others after them to make the trip to Lys and jump through the hoops necessary for the mistress of the pillow house to allow him to access. The typically pleasant coast of the Orange Shores was proving anything but as he marched what tatters were left of the Golden Company to fulfill the only contract he had been able to drum up, fighting in the service of the Volantenes. The Volantenes would pay in time, and if his men fought well, there'd be enough gold for them to begin enlisting recruits to fill up the empty ranks and enough slaves to begin birthing the new generation of embittered Westerosi exiles. Then he would beat back westward and fight for Alequo Adarys, a tyrant recently set up in Tyrosh by the Band of Nine (an alliance which included the Golden Company) - well, whenever Alequo was able to extort from his smallfolk enough coin to pay the Golden Company's asking price.

Or else there was always the embrace of the Old Mother, that haggard pirate queen who wanted their help reasserting herself in her old haunts among the Stepstones.

As he mulled these thoughts of contracts, offers and counter-offs in his mind one of his squires came in to serve him wine, no doubt some of the very last of what was left of the good stuff. He eyed the nervous lad's toing and froing with disinterest, until the bastard's name - something Flowers - lighted a small spark in his mind.

_The Reach… We still have friends in the Reach. _

The thought came to him loud and clear. He bellowed, nominally so as to call back the brothers to him, in truth to send the squire running off after them.

"Lucas and Brynden, come back here!"

A new plan took form as he simultaneously set it out for them. They were to head a small band of sellswords, Westerosi by right of their fathers but Essosi by birth. With these men they were to engage in whatever profitable activities might come their way, making their way for the Hightower in Oldtown, seat of House Hightower. The Hightowers were the most powerful of House Blackfyre's friends (or friends-in-potential), though their committal had never been whole-hearted in the past. Still, they had more than one drop of dragon's blood and a claim to the Iron Throne thanks to their direct descent from the Queen-Who-Never-Was, the first Targaryen princess to be bypassed in the succession. With the Blackfyre dynasty brought to an end upon the Stepstones, it was the duty of the Lord Commander of the Golden Company to find a suitable alternative to bring his men home.

Who could know? Perhaps Lord Leyton might even be convinced to take up Blackfyre and oust the falseborn from his rightful seat, restoring the men of the Golden Company their lost homes, properties and titles.


	3. Chapter 2a

**CHAPTER II. THE LOST SONS**

_Underneath the gold, the bitter steel_

The Lord Commander Myles Toyne had set them on a ship bound for the Arbor with instructions to seek out the young Lord Hightower and offer him the fealty of the Golden Company if he, in return, would commit himself to bringing them home. It was the move of a desperate man who found himself cornered and out of options; the wisdom of a novice donning armoury and regalia he felt ill at ease with. Mad Danelle's two boys, however, were less than impressed with the man the Golden Company had raised up in Maelys' place. Certainly they were not going to deliver up to him Maelys' Queen (which they and their lackeys had unanimously reported as dead), lest he wed her himself and make himself the new pretender; nor were they about to waste a trip back to Westeros executing his hair-brain scheme. And thus when they bid him godspeed, they took his coin and the passage given them back to home shores, but not the words he intended for Lord Hightower.

The Lothston brothers wanted the Iron Throne for themselves. But Lord Hightower would no sooner assist them than the Golden Company would march for them, no matter how righteous their claim. It was thus necessary they play the two off against each other - use Hightower to rebuild the Golden Company and then, at the right time, either oust Toyne from power or pull the carpet from under his feet. It was thus first and foremost that they procure a viable pretender for these men to rally around, a pretender to be used as a proxy for the Lothston claim which would supplant him or her in due time.

Such a pretender would naturally be subject to all manner of risk, and it was for that very same reason that Lucas would not risk the center piece of the cyvasse game he now played. Serala Bittersteel was the granddaughter of Calla Blackfyre and the heiress of all four of the Great Bastards of Aegon the Unworthy. Keeping her survival secret entailed keeping her pregnancy secret, which meant the Blackfyre line (rather conveniently, for Lucas' interests) was now given out as extinct. Her mother was an alternative - lacking in Blackfyre blood as she was, a whore and a witch all the days of her life - still young enough, in theory, but in truth already haggard and tired in every way imaginable.

Lucas had long ago grown to despise the old wench and freed himself of any desire to lay with her, leaving it to Brynden to endeavour to put a babe in her belly before they quit Lys. Such a child, with dragonsblood on both sides, could very easily be retroactively legitimized with claims of a marriage celebrated on foreign shores. Generally speaking, the legitimacy of those born in exile was often...dubious, if put under the same scrutiny as their Westerosi-born kin, or at very best, unimportant.

But for now the only bastard bat that had come forth had done so from a pretty blonde thing, once as slender as she was lithe but now more suited, in Lucas' judgement, to the pulling of hathays. Little Manfred was as lithe as his whore mother, who had tried to palm him off to the lady Serys as soon as her milk dried. Alas, Serys had not her daughter's aptitude for motherhood and was quite content to let the child be raised by the other whores at the pillow-house, safe for when he came to play with her own bastard giving her much needed respite from the maternal duties she loathed so.

And so the bastard - the plump, rosy little thing. Serys had brought him forth in obscure circumstances several years after her husband's demise had landed her back in the pillow-house from which he had sought to ransom her. The boy seemed to enjoy a new name each moon...off the top of his head Lothston could recall the old hag speaking with disinterest of her Balerion, Lothar, Lucas, Lysander, Gael, and most recently, Aegor. Whatever the truth of his paternity, his looks and age permitted Lothston to pass him off as a Blackfyre scion with no one capable of attesting to the contrary.

Aye, that was it - they'd put forward the boy for as long as was useful and then set him aside once the time was right.


	4. Chapter 2b

Lord Leyton's eyes glimmered as Lucas Lothston held up the blade of Kings before him. The flames from the fire danced more violently, it seemed, not only in the reflection borne by the prized steel of Old Valyria but in the eyes of Lord Leyton's trusted companion, Denys Darklyn, a noble lad from the Stormlands most likely related to the older Lord in some way. The Lothstons had done everything within their reach to convince Leyton Hightower to receive them in private, but he had been adamant on the presence of the Darklyn lad, much to their chagrin.

Lucas Lothston did not like the way the lad gazed upon the blade any more than he enjoyed the lad's earlier diatribe on his own drop of dragonsblood.

"Surely this is the sword upon which my ancestors swore their oaths of fealty and obeisance in times past!" Lord Leyton pronounced with great certainty.

Darklyn was less enthusiastic. "House Hightower has not forgotten how the blacks destroyed the descendants of Queen Alicent Hightower - of how the boy Maelor was torn limb from limb or of how the innocent Queen Jaehara, married to Aegon the Third as per the peace pactuated between the warring sides, was thrown down from Maegor's Holdfast and impaled at her husband's order when she was found to be with child. Today we find ourselves in the service of these self-same blacks, the children of Rhaenyra, those who slaughtered our kin to sit more comfortably atop the Iron Throne, all the while courted by the partisans of House Blackfyre, a house spawn from the same stock and unsuccessful at every turn in ridding us of the Targaryens. Can you see, Lord Lothston, the predicament in which we find ourselves?"

_We?_

Lothston grunted at that, holding the sword up higher for an instant before handing it back to Brynden and the sheath that awaited it.

"Ser Denys. The Blackfyre's bear the sword of Kings, and with it, the incontestable right to the fealty of all those whose ancestors ever swore upon it. It was the Targaryens who wronged the Hightowers, and the Targaryens who must pay."

Darklyn said nothing but Leyton piped up at that. "Aye, you've the sword, but what about the Blackfyres? Maelys is dead, and from what I've heard he was altogether thorough in his removal of his cousins and other rivals. Do you know much of our history, Lord Lothston?"

Both brothers shook their heads.

"It was under King Lymond that we first entered the Reach, when he put aside his wives and took as consort a daughter of Highgarden, a Gardener princess. When the Andals came the Lord of the Hightower rode out to meet them, setting aside his wife and marrying a princess of the Andals. In this way he prevented a bloody war and freed Oldtown to focus on its chief business, the commerce and business of the sea. When the Targaryens came, Lord Manfred welcomed the Conqueror and had the High Septon anoint him as King, in the hope of his daughter becoming Queen. In this he failed, but the Conqueror's successor was careful to take Ceryse Hightower as his first Queen. As you can see,"-

"Marriage is crucial to us." Denys Darklyn evidently did not have any qualms about cutting off the Lord of the Hightower, even in the presence of relative strangers.

He and Leyton stared each other for a second before returning their attentions - faces somber, countenances solemn - back to the brothers. An uncomfortable silence set in, to be broken by Darklyn yet again.

"If you want coin, give us a black dragon to marry. Give us two and we'll even bleed for you."

Darklyn smiled wickedly as he watched the idea blossoming in the troubled minds of his visitors.

"You mentioned the boy before. How old is he, where is he to be found now?"

Lucas looked at Brynden, a little taken aback by the question, and relinquishing to his brother command of the conversation. Their attempts at revealing as little as possible were proving increasingly difficult as the young Hightower and his guest held back no punches in their search for information as to the reality of the Blackfyre cause post the latest failed rebellion.

"Aegor Blackfyre is but a child, and to be found traipsing around his mother's skirts in the the Free Cities."

Lord Leyton stood, ostensibly so as to signal the meeting was over, and Darklyn slid to his side. The semblance of the two Lothstons fell and Lucas stammered in an attempt to utter something further, which stammering was silenced with a single quick look of reprove from Darklyn. Instead of departing, however, Lord Leyton beckoned for four servants to come forward. With great care he opened a most ornate chest and drew from it some great prize, judging by the great care he took as he lifted it and deposited it into Darklyn's hands.

The Lothstons said nothing but the eyes grew all the wider as he drew near.

Darklyn was resolute.

"Bring us the boy and his mother. Those are our initial terms. If you wish for our assistance, for our gold and our arms, you will bring the pretender here and secure our alliance with a marriage."


End file.
